Dec. 30, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:26
Participants
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unidentified
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Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? | |
| Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne? | ||
| For auld lang syne, my dear For auld lang syne We'll take a cup of kindness yet For auld lang syne | ||
| Surely you'll buy your breakup And surely I'll buy mine I can't take my cup of kindness yet For auld lang syne For auld lang syne | ||
| For auld lang syne, we'll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne. | ||
| We two have had a livin's dream from mornin's time till now, but this which we must part, our hearts is auld lang syne. | ||
| For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we'll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne. | ||
| And let the hand my trusty friend, my little auld lang syne, We'll take a ride, we'll draft for old Lansdyne. | ||
| For old Lansdyne, I did, for old Lansdyne. | ||
| I will take a cup of kindness yet for old Lansdyne. | ||
| Oh We'll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Gene. | ||
| Cray for Here's how I got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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unidentified
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War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | |
| Okay, it's Saturday, 30th December, year of the roller, 2023. | ||
| We're also, this is our New Year's Eve special, since the team at Real America's Voice and of course our great production team here at the Worm, we let them have Sunday off, the Sabbath. | ||
| So, this is also our New Year's Eve special. | ||
| Tremendous moving voices there from Dublin that welcomed us in, or rang out the New Year. | ||
| We're going to talk about the most important things of this year as far as trends, analysis, things that are happening that let you reflect back over the year, hopefully spend a few moments reflecting back over your own personal life over the year, and particularly how | ||
| It became intertwined with this effort to save this republic, which is what this show is about, as essentially a platform to help unite you in your task and purpose of saving this country. | ||
| I want to start internationally. | ||
| We're going to actually go, if everything goes according to plan, we're also going to go to southern Mexico. | ||
| We're going to talk about the invasion of our country. | ||
| In fact, we're going to stay with the most important things, the financial collapse of our country, the invasion of our country. | ||
| Also talk about the geopolitics of the world today. | ||
| And particularly how you guys have been right in your determination to make sure that the country always puts America and our citizens first, against all the lies, misrepresentation, spin, all of it that's been handled to you. | ||
| Ben Harnwell in Rome, and I know we want to go back and talk about the most important things that happened and how they happened. | ||
| But I do have to, I think I want to start here at where we are and then work back because I do agree with you upon further review, as we talked about the show, that this Politico story from the other day, and now it's been picked up by so many others, of how the Biden regime, and this is how, to me, cuts to the core of their evilness, of how they're now trying to, with words, trying to soft pedal a new strategy, which is to hopefully hold on | ||
| The Ukrainians to hold on to Kiev, given the fact that they've lost the war that the Biden regime got them into in the beginning. | ||
| I want to go back to that, particularly given your knowledge of the EU and British politics. | ||
| We started the year, and remember, we had been against this from the absolute very beginning in February of the year before, January, February, February of 22. | ||
| We were adamant about where this was going to lead, and I'm very proud of this audience. | ||
| I'm very proud of the people we had on the show. | ||
| Our party line has not changed from the absolute beginning, and we have been one million percent right about this from the beginning. | ||
| And start at 23, and really the end of the first year, beginning of the second year, the media spin was hitting high, was in high volume on MSNBC and CNN about how there was huge momentum from coming out of Ukraine and Zelensky, and Zelensky made his heroic trip to Capitol Hill where he was treated like, you know, Churchill. | ||
| And then all the talk was and all the buildup was for the Spring Offensive. | ||
| But go back to a year ago about how, you know, how this thing was. | ||
| I mean, the Ukrainian propaganda forces were in high overdrive, given where we are in a year of which we told people we would be here. | ||
| And actually, I think it could turn out to be much worse. | ||
| Ben Harnwell. | ||
| Steve, good morning to you. | ||
| Well, look, if this is an end of year review, then let's do exactly what you just said a few moments ago and look at the trends and see how they played out. | ||
| And my analysis of 2023, if I'm going to put it in a single sentence, is 2023 was the year that pretty much validated everything that we had speculated on in 2022. | ||
| Now, End of year reviews, right? | ||
| It requires a slight amount of humility. | ||
| I didn't get every single judgment call right. | ||
| I'm happy to admit that. | ||
| Two things I specifically got wrong. | ||
| Every single thing else, however, in the face of all the so-called experts, all the talking heads on mainstream media and on all the cable news, we called it, Steve, in real time on every single significant aspect of this. | ||
| And one of the ways we did this I think it was because we refused. | ||
| Something that we obviously we're 100% on, along with the War Room Posse, is that we don't take the manufactured and synthetic narrative from the mainstream media and assume it's true. | ||
| We dissect it analytically with hypersensitivity. | ||
| And we take out from that, we extract from the totality of the mainstream media, the data points which can be externally verified. | ||
| And we plot our own line between those data points. | ||
| And that is, we do the work ourselves, the heavy lifting ourselves, the analysis ourselves. | ||
| And that is why I think the War Room Posse and the War Room, why we can be so proud of our analysis over this past year. | ||
| Now, let's start right now and work our way back because there was, as you were mentioning, an article just | ||
| A few days ago in Politico, which highlighted, I mean, it was somewhat of a buried lead, but it highlighted something that we had been saying was going to take place for the preceding sort of nine to 12 months, which this was the line pushed by President Biden and President Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, that the West will support Ukraine for, in quotation marks, as long as it takes. | ||
| And then what happened about two or three weeks ago when President Zelensky was over on his last begging mission to... Hold on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
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unidentified
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| Don't bury the lead. | ||
| Because we've got to get this right. | ||
| However long it takes, with whatever it takes. | ||
| It was both a commitment of duration and a commitment of unlimited resources. | ||
| This is what, this is the lie to the Ukrainian people. | ||
| The Ukrainian people were told by the highest levels of representations of your government that you pay for. | ||
| and EU, British, all of it, but particularly Biden came up with this. | ||
| However long it takes, with whatever it takes. | ||
| So they made a commitment not just open-ended, which is unheard of, open-ended as far as time goes, but also about the depth of resources that we were put in. | ||
| And with no conditions. I mean, this was an unconditional, unconditional full support Ben Harnwell. | ||
| Steve, well it was a lie to the Ukrainian people and very much an endorsement of Professor John Mearshamer's thesis right back at the beginning that the Americans were going to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian. | ||
| That's pretty much an absolute endorsement of his cynical but absolutely accurate analysis. | ||
| But Steve, it wasn't just a lie. | ||
| To the Ukrainian people, a disastrous, catastrophic lie to the Ukrainian people. | ||
| It was a lie to the people of the United States. | ||
| It was a lie to America's NATO allies or NATO satellites, whichever term you like to prefer to use. | ||
| And it could have been exposed as a lie with a simple cursory reading of the United States Constitution. | ||
| President Biden had zero authority to make that guarantee because, of course, it requires Congress to sign off on it. | ||
| One of the theses that I say constantly about sociopathic overlords, the reason I say, and I'm not joking, I'm not going to make an amusing formulation of words here, these people are sociopaths and the reason that they're sociopaths is that there is no limit on the harm and evil and malevolence that these people will do as long as they can elbow themselves to the front of an international press conference and posture at the podium as a morally superior being. | ||
| No limit on the harm that they will do. And if I can close, Steve, on this point with this analysis, right, and we'll talk about this as the show goes on. | ||
| What has absolutely emerged, especially towards the end of 2023, is that the damage that the United States is doing to the international rules-based order exceeds by many, many factors that damage that would have simply happened if Russia had been allowed to annex a disputed territory of the Donbass with zero repercussions. | ||
| Now that would have been damaging to the international rules-based order, beloved of our global elites, but what they are doing, supposedly in the defense of that order, is catastrophically undermining that, that order, and leaving in its place chaos. | ||
| Hang on for one second. | ||
| We'll take a short break here on our New Year's Eve special. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| We're going to go back to Rome with our own Ben Harnawan in just a moment. | ||
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unidentified
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So, let's go. | |
| So, we're going to go back to Rome. | ||
| Okay, Happy New Year. | ||
| The New Year's weekend where we bring down the curtain on the old and open the curtain on the new. | ||
|
unidentified
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Incredible historic year. | |
| For those of you that have been with us, and for those of you just coming on board now, I want to make sure the whole show today is to kind of put it in perspective this year that we came from, or came through, and your role in it, and your role has been | ||
| The dominant role the reason that Biden is now trying to soft sell a new set of objectives and a new set of Perspectives on this debacle in Ukraine and the lies on the Ukraine Is because you've stood firm and made sure you convinced the the globalist Neocon Republicans in the House, besides the America First, which is about 100. | ||
| You've convinced the others now that they will be turfed out if they continue along this debacle in Ukraine. | ||
| And this is vitally important. | ||
| They tried to hold hostage the sovereignty of our own nation by coupling this with this border. | ||
| And it was just going to be, you know, more optics, more cosmetics on the border situation. | ||
| To try to say, oh, we're going to get very tough on the border if you give us the 60 or 70 billion dollars to Ukraine. | ||
| Rahim is going to join us here in a moment, and Rahim is, in fact, was, for me, he was an editor of Breitbart London, and he was there at the beginning of this color revolution in 2013 and 14, I believe he went over. | ||
| to Kiev itself to cover it live. I think one of the first time in five days to cover the revolution, this color revolution live. So he said, we've been there since the very beginning. | ||
| And it's very tough to make Haydn or Herod this. And the reason is you can never tell who the players are. It's all, it's a wilderness of mirrors. In fact, in this band, I'd be remiss and talk about where we've come this year. And now this, and remember the always remember Biden's putting a new face on this for the world is because of this audience, specifically this audience stood up when the whole world was against us, | ||
| when the Republican party was against us. And he said, absolutely no way. | ||
| This is 100% wrong. | ||
| We don't have the money. | ||
| We shouldn't be supporting this. | ||
| We don't like the elites are involved with this. | ||
| But most importantly, this is the wrong thing for the Ukrainian people because we're going to end up in a place where the Eastern The border of Ukraine with the Russian-speaking provinces is not going to change. | ||
| Crimea is not going to change. | ||
| You're going to lose tens, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians. | ||
| They're going to be funneled into the Charnel House. | ||
| And remember, most of those Ukrainians are just like you. | ||
| They're the deplorables of Ukraine. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| They're the MAGA types of Ukraine. | ||
| They're the hobbits. | ||
| They got shoveled into the Charnel House here with a country that's left like, as I keep saying, If you look at Bakhmut and some of these places, there's no difference in that than Dresden in 1945. | ||
| So, that's where we've come, and this audience stood in the breach at the beginning and said, this does not have to happen, because there's other ways to sort this out. | ||
| It turns out, Ben, even in the early days of war, more of this is coming out now as fingers are going to start to be pointed. | ||
| And history is not going to look good on guys like Zelensky and Biden and Jake Sullivan, particularly Victoria Nuland. | ||
| As we've said from the beginning, when all, most of the conservative commentariat was sitting there calling Zelensky, they were fanboying for Zelensky worse than they fanboy for Elon Musk. | ||
| I mean, it was sickening. | ||
| Certain commentators whose names I will not mention putting Instagram pictures up or tweeting out pictures as Lindsay going. | ||
| This is what Churchill looks like I mean absolutely revolting And we told people at the time that this guy was a not a good guy And was only looking after himself, but it turns out that the British particularly the United States were bad and But it turns out the British and Boris Johnson... So the question, we're hands-on of not letting the Ukrainians even come to some sort of negotiated deal in the very early days of this. | ||
| What is the obsession? | ||
| With the Victoria Nuland's of the world, and the Boris Johnson's of the world, and that click with Ukraine, there's something that the average person, and this one I consider myself an average person, can't understand why this whole thing's been about Ukraine, and particularly shoveling money into Ukraine, that when President Trump Even had a perfect phone call and brought up the fact of corruption and have to get to the bottom of it. | ||
| He's immediately, when I say immediately, within 60 days impeached. | ||
| The highest thing you can do to an American president, Ben Hornwell. | ||
| Steve, well really, this just illustrates the existential danger that Donald Trump confronted the corrupt US military industrial Complex with. | ||
| And it was an existential threat to them. | ||
| And that's why they locked in. | ||
| They wasted two basically legislative years with impeachment inquiries. | ||
| on Donald Trump because they could not afford to let his program go forward. | ||
| And the reason that Donald Trump was an existential threat to these people was that his mandate, and I don't know, probably I don't know enough about American history in the first century of the Republic. | ||
| Perhaps Andrew Jackson would be a parallel who won on the mandate of abolishing the precursor to what is today the Federal Reserve, and he did abolish it. | ||
| Both Trump and Jackson had popular mandates with the people. | ||
| They weren't just basically like Joe Biden is. | ||
| Booking's term that they'd done, they'd served their time, they'd worked their way up the greasy pole. | ||
| And therefore, you know, in the absence of anyone else, they said, OK, so let Joe do it, as they did on the Democrat side. | ||
| And before that, Hillary, right? | ||
| People with no particular merit. | ||
| Donald Trump had never even fought a political election campaign. | ||
| His mandate to drain the swamp and to build the wall, I do not know. | ||
| I do not know in the 20th century any political leader to be elected as head of state with a mandate so pure and so convincing given from the people that that sort of transcended the political party that that candidate was standing for. | ||
| And it was a direct relationship to the people. | ||
| to their representative. That's why they hated him so much because he wasn't controlled opposition as we're used to seeing for decades now, sort of on the table tennis ball that goes between, flips between the blue team and the red team. He was a guy with his own mandate enabled by the people themselves to do something. That's why the Robert Kagan's and the Victoria Newlands, the whole of the mainstream media which it was support and paid for. | ||
| This is the reason all of Congress, all of the Senate, this is why the reason that they are, that they display what we call Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
| It's not really, they're not really deranged. | ||
| They're acting like rats leaving a sinking ship. | ||
| They were acting purely, and still are to this day, in their vested, corrupt vested interests. | ||
| And you only need to look, right? | ||
| I'll close with this observation. | ||
| Just look at this back. | ||
| The paladins, when it comes to Ukraine, the paladins of democracy, We'll support a guy who suppressed his political opposition in Ukraine and will then in Colorado remove a person from, or try to remove a person, from the ballot paper to specifically deprive the people from exercising their democratic prerogatives. | ||
| That just shows you just how far gone these people are. | ||
| They must be opposed, they will be opposed, and they will fundamentally lose in the long run, Steve. | ||
| What, um, in this year, as it went through too, because we had the, uh, give me a minute on the, on the spring offensive, because that was the big sale job of, and they were coming off, they thought they had the wind to their back in leaving 22 into 23. | ||
| 23 was where they were going to deliver the knockout blow. | ||
| to the Russians with the quote-unquote spring offensive. | ||
| And at the time we said, because remember it was a huge fight over getting the combined arms, the tanks from Germany, the close air support, all this. | ||
| We said it's impossible, you can't train troops up here, this is not something that's done over the night. | ||
| The United States Army ain't that great at it and we've been doing it for decades and decades and decades and kind of learned it from the British. | ||
| Walk me through that, that fiasco, and just the bald-faced, absolute lies that were told in this entire time. | ||
| Well, Steve, if you want to pick out one event from the last two years in Ukraine that exemplifies exactly what the corrupt ruling elites have done, look at the counter-offensive. | ||
| I think it's increasingly obvious now that there was never really the intention of having a war deciding initiative with this first spring offensive, then summer offensive. | ||
| It was a pretext. | ||
| A pretext to do what? | ||
| To bilk the American taxpayer for money. | ||
| Because you've got to remember, a lot of the funding that the United States gave to Zelensky and his regime of crooks for this counter-offensive, that's unaccounted for. | ||
| We don't know where that money has gone. | ||
| A lot of the arms that the United States gave to Ukraine have ended up on the secondary market. | ||
| All over the world, right? | ||
| Because they were just selling them and pocketing the cash. | ||
| So it was just a pretext, Steve. | ||
| It was a pretext to beat the American taxpaying public over the head with lies so that the American elites could put their hands in the back pocket of the American taxpayers with minimum resistance. | ||
| And that is exactly what happened. | ||
| And if you want to see another repetition of this, I'll give way. | ||
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unidentified
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I thought that was a cue for a break there. | |
| Hang on a second. | ||
| Just hold the break. | ||
| We're going to bring Rahim in too. | ||
| We're connected back to the start of this. | ||
| And also, at the beginning of the year, Ron DeSantis was up 20 points on Donald J. Trump. | ||
| We're going to tie it all together next in the Word. | ||
|
unidentified
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♪ | |
| ♪ Should old acquaintance be forgot and never wonder by, Shall old acquaintance be forgot and no man's side? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
|
unidentified
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I want to connect some dots here. | |
| The two biggest stories of this year and things that drove it were, one, your efforts to get this Congress straight, but it was really tied to this out-of-control spending. | ||
| The out-of-control spending is inextricably linked with this concept of an American empire, that we have to be everywhere, we have to have a trillion-dollar defense budget, we are the guardians of this quote-unquote post-war international rules-based order, which has really done nothing but strip jobs from working-class people in the United States, suppress your wages, | ||
| Worsen your economic well-being at the benefit of the elites of the world that are profited off of this. | ||
| Both these stories go back to really 2013-2014, the migration issue starting in Europe with the Syrian civil war and then Merkel allowing in, I don't know, a couple of million, million and a half Syrian quote-unquote refugees, where Orban and others stood their ground. | ||
| In addition, the beginning of the Of the of the Ukraine color revolution driven by the United States, Victoria Nuland, the people of the State Department. | ||
| And here we are today, getting ready to close the books on 23 and going to 24. | ||
| And you see that these are two of the biggest stories of today, 10 years later, with only one big development in between. | ||
| And what was that? | ||
| The rise of Nigel Farage and the kind of populist nationalist right in the United Kingdom that led to them Brexit and taking their country back and their sovereignty, which was the predicate for the great come-from-behind, out-of-nowhere victory of President Trump in the beginning and rise of the MAGA movement. | ||
| So we're going to tie it all together with people that were there. | ||
| That would be Stephen K. Bannon, Ben Harnwell, and Rahim Kassam. | ||
| Rahim, I want to go back to those days, particularly the way this year started, because this year started, and this is why it's been such a big reversal of fortune. | ||
| And if you watch this show every day, maybe sometimes you don't get it, because we've been so adamant about both things, about what a worm Zelensky was, an untrustworthy guy, and a puppet for the West, and all these things were lies, and you could see through it pretty easily if you focused. | ||
| And the demise of Donald Trump or the rise of Ron DeSantis. | ||
| At the beginning of the year, Zelensky's capital Was as high as he was nearing his high watermark, and so was Ron DeSantis. | ||
| Ron DeSantis, people forget, was up, I don't know, 20 points on President Trump. | ||
| And if President Trump had not announced immediately after the midterm election, it would have been much, it would have been much, much worse. | ||
| Rahim, put it in perspective for us. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| I think it was the timing that was critical to a lot of it. | ||
| And I think it was this audience, by the way, that was critical to a lot of it, if not all of it, quite frankly. | ||
| Because at the beginning of the year, in January especially, I mean, you know, the national polls We issued our endorsement the day after President Trump made his announcement, right? | ||
| But for most people, not really plugged into what was going on. | ||
| Hold it. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I just want everybody to remember, that was on 15 November, right after the midterm elections. | ||
| You were down there. | ||
| You were one of the few. | ||
| I mean, we covered it. | ||
| We had a whole crew down there of Moe, and I think Grace went, and I think we had Nicole O'Grady there, and Natalie Winters, Jane Zirkle. | ||
| We fully had a full deployment. | ||
| We covered it live here in the War Room. | ||
| You were there. | ||
| I think it was you and Seb. | ||
| And Matt Boyle and a couple of others, but you could even hardcore MAGA, there was a lot that were not there. | ||
| DeSantis has just come off that big midterm victory, up 30 points I think, or 20 points in Florida. | ||
| And so many, and people remember, so many of the people, a couple or three of the people who used to be on this show, Just jumped right onto it. | ||
| DeSantis is the guy. | ||
| So, I mean, Trump's lowest point, even almost as bad as January and February of 2021, when he first got to Mar-a-Lago, maybe March, was right after that midterm when he announced, boldly announced, set it in motion. | ||
| But by January, he's still 20 points down, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And if you don't mind, by the way, I will say that all of these sort of You know, the former Hispanic hard man that used to come on this show and gibber to the audience about whatever they want, they caved immediately, right? | ||
| And I don't even need to mention names, but they caved immediately. | ||
| And by the way, now, look, you know, it's the end of the year. | ||
| They all know they messed up. | ||
| They're all trying to make their way back in somehow. | ||
| But the people who turned up on November the 15th, we are the people who were there in 2015, right, before everything, before all of the hangers-on, all the clingers-on. | ||
| You know, we always use the phrase, especially to talk about people like Nigel Farage, Trump before Trump, right? | ||
| And a lot of people do this for a very long time. | ||
| Geert Wilders is another one that I can think of that's been there and doing this and putting his shoulder to the wheel and not wavering, right? | ||
| They're not trying to find some compromise with the political establishment, say, okay, well, we'll choose a less controversial version of that. | ||
| And that's what a lot of people thought they were getting out of Ron DeSantis. | ||
| I saw very early on, if the audience wants to know why, because I talked to a lot of those people. | ||
| I talked to the pushers and the tier man's and like all of those people of the world who ended up defecting. | ||
| And I looked at it and I said, you guys don't know what you're doing. | ||
| You don't know how to run a national campaign. | ||
| You don't know how to work the media. | ||
| You don't have a base. | ||
| And frankly, a lot of these people are wildly dislikable people. | ||
| The Jeff Rose of the world, all of these people in the DeSantis milieu, Ended up being people who just couldn't appeal to people at a very human level. | ||
| So that's why you saw as the year went on and they led up to that launch amidst their donors in the basement in that hotel in Miami. | ||
| And then they did the glitchy launch on Twitter.com as it was back then. | ||
| And then of course we were told, oh, well, you know, maybe that didn't go very well, but wait until he gets on that debate stage, then everybody will see. | ||
| And everybody did see. | ||
| And I wouldn't call Ron DeSantis an empty suit, but, but, you know, maybe the, maybe the ozempics had too far of an impact because, because he is coming across like that. | ||
| And it isn't coming across like Trump without the drama. | ||
| He's coming across as Ted Cruz without the charisma. | ||
| And that has only worsened. | ||
| I mean, you saw the same thing take place over the course of the year with Zelensky. | ||
| I remember coming on the show in, I think it was February, and saying, mark my words, There is no spring offensive. | ||
| This is all talk. | ||
| It's all to get the political class to part with more American taxpayer cash, to send it overseas, to cover up for the things that they're covering up for in Ukraine. | ||
| It's not a coincidence that Ukraine was what President Trump was first impeached over. | ||
| And it's not a coincidence that they also lied about this spring offensive that never came to pass. | ||
| And then the third thing I think that, you know, this audience really put their shoulder to the wheel on is Kevin McCarthy and getting him out of there. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| We're going to pivot to that in a second, but I want to go back to Ukraine. | ||
| The first chink in the armor for those people that were MAG or maybe taking a look at DeSantis was also Ukraine. | ||
| Let's go back to that. | ||
| When he came out and he took the, I think on Tucker, he took the kind of America First, War Room, Tucker party line, National Pulse party line. | ||
| Yeah, regional dispute. | ||
| This thing, regional dispute, it's the national security interest of the United States, the vital national security, is the southern border, not the eastern speaking Russian border. | ||
| He had that down from his staff, clearly had been watching these shows. | ||
| He was prepped to do it. | ||
| And it's all about Ukraine. | ||
| And then immediately the bricks fell on him from the Republican donor base. | ||
| And why do they care? | ||
| For folks at home, why would the Republican donors? | ||
| Here's a guy running, trying to out-Trump Trump. | ||
| And Trump's been very ambivalent about this from the beginning, saying, hey, I can solve this thing in 24 hours. | ||
| But, you know, fighting is not the way to do it. | ||
| War is not the way to do it. | ||
| And Putin would have never done this in a million years if I was there. | ||
| DeSantis came in to actually be to the right of Trump, to a degree, and then caved immediately. | ||
| Why would Ron DeSantis, having prepped his whole life for this, Thought about it, held his military credentials out as a big deal that he really understood geopolitics. | ||
| Why would he come out, take our party line, and then fold like a cheap suit within 24 hours, sir? | ||
| Firstly, a correction. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have a question for you. | |
| What is the Islamist group in Gaza? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's the Muslim Brotherhood, sir. | |
| So why call them Republican donors? | ||
| They're not Republican donors. | ||
| They're globalist donors. | ||
| Globalist. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| And it just so happens to be at the time, at this time, they're giving money to a Republican, right? | ||
| But just like Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood, these globalist donor classes are still the globalist donor class, and we shouldn't refer to them as Republican donors. | ||
| These are not people who believe in the same things as Republicans all across this country do. | ||
| These are not people who believe in closed borders. | ||
| These are not people who believe in, by the way, higher tax rates for the billionaire class, the multi-billionaire class that is getting away with all the globalist policies everywhere. | ||
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No. | |
| I mean, this is a globalist racket we're talking about here. | ||
| And DeSantis, like you say, caved to them immediately. | ||
| Caved to them immediately. | ||
| Over an issue which he was clearly told, hey, if you can't get right with this, then you ain't right with us, and we will do everything to stop you getting insulminations. | ||
| Chris caves immediately. | ||
| And by the way, you've got to look to just not him, but to all the people around him. | ||
| I mentioned Pushaw earlier. | ||
| You know, masquerading as MAGA for the last several years, then comes out against Donald Trump, and then you go back and you look at their history. | ||
| I mean, she's a darker advocate. | ||
| She talks about illegal migrants into the United States. | ||
| And these people hadn't received this level of scrutiny, whether it's DeSantis, Jeff Rowe, or the team around them. | ||
| And as soon as that level of scrutiny was applied, everything collapsed. | ||
| And I know they like to joke, like, oh, you guys talk about his shoes, you talk about his suit, you talk about his, you know, bobbling his head all over the place. | ||
| Those are not serious things. | ||
| They don't get it. | ||
| Those are not serious things because he's not a serious candidate. | ||
| Those are used to show how utterly unserious him and his campaign are, and time and time again over the course of this year, that cadre of people who are, by the way, the Neo-Never Trumpets. | ||
| That's who they, you know, that's who they Prediction for the next year, they're all going to move over to RFK, OK? | ||
| They're all going to shift their allegiance to RFK. | ||
| They're not going to go back to Trump. | ||
| Some may try, right? | ||
| Some of the ones that we know who have been on this show may try. | ||
| But the majority of those people, they're not going to go back to Trump. | ||
| They've set their face like Flint to being never Trump now. | ||
| So they are the neo-never Trumpers, is what we'll know them as. | ||
| And frankly, I don't think the country will look at Ron DeSantis the same again. | ||
| No, political career destroyed. | ||
| Hang on for one second. | ||
| Ben Harnwell in Rome, Raheem Kassam, both of them there at the beginning of all this, reviewing 2023, a historic year, the ascendance of MAGA as a political force. | ||
| Short commercial break, back in a moment. | ||
|
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♪♪ | |
| ♪ Should old acquaintance be forgotten, nevermore to come? | ||
| ♪ Remember, we're ending a year of turbulence and heading into a year of even greater turbulence. | ||
| That's why you need now, more than ever, to understand de-dollarization. | ||
| The importance of the dollar being the prime reserve currency. | ||
| Not that it's something we should not think through. | ||
| But it's also something that you just can't get off of immediately or you will have a collapse of your system. | ||
| Go to birchgold.com slash abandon right now. | ||
| Get the end of the dollar empire for four free installments to get you up to speed. | ||
| A fifth one is coming in mid-January. | ||
| But also you can talk to Philip Patrick and the team about why gold has been a hedge for man. | ||
| For 5,000 years of recorded history. | ||
| Understand that and you will be a better person for it and a smarter person for it. | ||
| Gold's close to an all-time high here as we end the year, but that's not in and of itself the most important thing. | ||
| It's why it is at an all-time high. | ||
| In closing out this hour, I've got to go back to something because this is going to inform us In reviewing the rest of your particularly about McCarthy and about what this audience did and about the invasion on the southern border. | ||
| I'll start with you Rahim and I'll go to Ben. | ||
| It wasn't like he said I'm going to raise the taxes of the billionaires or you know, I want to do something tougher on the border or end asylum something. | ||
| This about Ukraine. | ||
| The stand he took which was really not as hard as us. | ||
| So it was, uh, but it was in the sweet spot of America first. | ||
| They came down on DeSantis like a ton of bricks. | ||
| And like a little boy, he reversed in a very sloppy and unsophisticated manner. | ||
| He immediately exposed to the entire world that he was nothing more than a neocon if you scratched the surface and didn't believe anything. | ||
| So then, how could you believe anything this guy said when something so important as the Ukraine war at the beginning of the year. | ||
| Why is it that the globalist donor class elite will not allow any heresy whatsoever in thinking about something like the Ukraine, sir? | ||
| Yeah, I don't mean to sound like a contrarian on this, and maybe you're just teeing me up here, but I completely disagree with the framing of the question again. | ||
| He absolutely was at that point in time talking about something worse than raising the taxes. | ||
| It is a tax raise as far as they're concerned, right? | ||
| They are stakeholders in this war. | ||
| They are shareholders in the companies that make the money on the war. | ||
| The ultimate tax rise is a tax on their philosophy. | ||
| The tax on their philosophy, by not backing something like that, is a tax on globalism. | ||
| It's a tax on the rules-based global order that they have been beneficiaries of and even helped to set up, have familial lineage in that going back decades, to set up. | ||
| So for them, it's worse than two or three pennies on the dollar in terms of a tax rise. | ||
| It's the ultimate tax rise. | ||
| This is putting them out of business. | ||
| They are stakeholders in this war. | ||
| They are stakeholders in globalism. | ||
| And I think that's the way people need to look at it. | ||
| This isn't a minor issue to these people. | ||
| Just like Iraq and Afghanistan were places where so many people made their fortunes into bigger fortunes, they have been invested in Ukraine in the very same way. | ||
| And mark my words, once this coming year Ukraine is left by the wayside, they will turn their attention somewhere else on foreign soil to try and grift Of destruction, disease, catastrophe, killing, you name it. | ||
| But that's what's going on here. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, your assessment? | ||
| Yeah, I want to start off from Raheem's starting point as well and question the framing of how you put that, Steve. | ||
| Look, as far as I'm concerned, judging by how he's been governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis isn't a neocon. | ||
| He's something worse than a neocon. | ||
| He's weak. | ||
| That is fundamentally, I think, the issue here. | ||
| As governor, he's been, I think, pretty good, pretty outstanding as governor, right? | ||
| The reason is that he crumpled, as you said, like a cheap suit because he's weak. | ||
| Now, you can criticise Donald Trump for many things, right? | ||
| And people do criticise him even when he's wrong. | ||
| He never backs down, right? | ||
| But compared to someone whose instincts may be right, though not on the point that Rahim was mentioning, I'm not going to argue with that because he's absolutely right, but on the general point, you cannot at this point in an existential crisis that the United States now is, put someone who is weak At the top of the apex. | ||
| That would be just catastrophic. | ||
| It would be worse than putting Nikki Haley there, right? | ||
| That's my first observation I want to make. | ||
| The second observation, to come back to your question, is why did the donor class fall down on him so instantly? | ||
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Look, I'm going to have to riff again off of Rahim. | |
| Top 1% of the United States owns, I think, Owns has more wealth than the bottom 90% put together, right? | ||
| That is not a consequence of free market capitalism. | ||
| I'm a free market capitalist, an uber free market capitalist. | ||
| That is not a consequence and I'm not peddling envy here about the rich because their gains are not a consequence of satisfying consumers in the free market. | ||
| Their gains, as Rahim was saying, are due to the fact that these people have gamed the system for their own advantage to the extent that the ordinary regular working guy can never move ahead, right? | ||
| That's why we have seen this phenomenon, right? | ||
| That people with hundreds of millions of dollars have become billionaires at one end of the spectrum and at the other end of the spectrum people working two and even more jobs and still not able to make it to the end of the month. | ||
| That is not a consequence of free market capitalism. | ||
| It's a consequence that the system is not only corrupt, but corrupting. | ||
| To repeat the point I mentioned earlier, this is why Donald Trump represented In 2016, an existential threat to their interests because they are doing this. | ||
| The elites are doing this in the face of the American people with literally zero percent of popular support. | ||
| The only way they can get away with that is by making sure whoever is the leader of the red team or the blue team, that they're pulling the puppet strings. | ||
| And obviously, Mondesantis was told the nature of the game and he crumpled. | ||
| Hang on one second. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Back with Raheem, Ben Harnwell. | ||
| We're also going to go to southern Mexico to talk about the invasion of your beloved country. | ||
| We may even track down Dave Brad if we can. | ||
| All of it here on the New Year's Eve special, The War Room. |
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